Roman Baths, Bath

Hot water has been welling up in the centre of Bath since long before the Romans came: about 1.17 million litres a day at 46 °C, rain that fell on the Mendip Hills and sank through limestone to depths of several kilometres before rising again along a fault. The Romans built a temple here between AD 60 and 70 and gradually surrounded the spring with a bathing complex that grew over the next three centuries, and the settlement that formed around it took the name Aquae Sulis, the waters of Sulis, a local goddess whom the newcomers identified with Minerva.

The heart of a visit is the Great Bath, a steaming pool lined with lead from the Mendips, open to the sky and ringed by terraces. What is Roman lies mostly below street level: the pool itself, the sacred spring in its lead-lined chamber, the remains of heated rooms and plunge baths, and the precinct of the temple. Everything above, including the colonnaded terrace with its statues of Roman emperors and governors of Britain, dates from the 19th century, which gives the place its particular character, an ancient bath seen through a Victorian frame. The water cannot be touched; bathing in the spring's waters today happens at the nearby Thermae Bath Spa and the restored Cross Bath.

The museum holds what the spring swallowed. Worshippers threw in more than 12,000 Roman coins, the largest votive deposit known from Britain, and around 130 lead curse tablets, found in 1979 and 1980, in which bathers asked the goddess to punish whoever had stolen their clothes. There is the gilt-bronze head of Sulis Minerva, found nearby in 1727, and fragments of the temple pediment with its extraordinary central face, a glaring male head with wings and snakes knotted in his beard, usually read as a fusion of Minerva's Gorgon with a local water god.

After Rome withdrew, the baths silted up and fell into ruin, and the springs were rebuilt around again and again: a medieval curative bath by John of Tours, a Queen's Bath of the 16th century where Anne of Denmark bathed in 1613 and 1615, and finally the Georgian spa of John Wood the Elder and the Younger. The Grand Pump Room, begun by Thomas Baldwin in 1789 and finished by John Palmer in 1799, is where fashionable Bath came to drink the waters, and it is still used for that today. The visitor entrance is through J. M. Brydon's glass-domed concert hall of 1897, joined to the Pump Room.

Getting there

The Roman Baths are in Abbey Churchyard, next to Bath Abbey, in the middle of Bath. Bath Spa railway station and the bus station are about a five- to ten-minute walk away via Stall Street. The nearest airport is Bristol Airport (BRS), about 25 km to the west. Bath has park-and-ride car parks around the edge of the city with buses into the centre.